The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook

The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook. The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost, and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.

Once upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs and the Greatest Wealth in History

The best-selling author of Bringing Down the House (63 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and the basis for the hit movie 21) and The Accidental Billionaires (the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network) delivers an epic drama of wealth, rivalry, and betrayal among megawealthy Russian oligarchs - and its international repercussions.

Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire - and How it All Came Crashing Down...

Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, acclaimed author Ben Mezrich's Straight Flush tells the captivating rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world. But then the U.S. Department of Justice placed a bull's-eye on Absolute Poker. Did they fold - or double down and ride their hot hand?

Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One

Edward O. Thorp is the father of card counting, and in Beat the Dealer he reveals the revolutionary point system that has been successfully used by professional and amateur card players for two generations. From Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, the tables have been turned, and the house no longer has the advantage at blackjack.

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History's Most Iconic Extinct Creatures

Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic Circle and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant.

Rigged

This is the startling rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange. After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, he enters the testosterone-laced warrens of the Merc Exchange, the asylumlike oil exchange located in lower Manhattan.

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street

The rise over the last two decades of a powerful new class of billionaire financiers marks a singular shift in the American economic and political landscape. Their vast reserves of concentrated wealth have allowed a small group of big winners to write their own rules of capitalism and public policy. How did we get here? Through meticulous reporting and powerful storytelling, New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar shows how Steve Cohen became one of the richest and most influential figures in finance—and what happened when the Justice Department put him in its crosshairs.

The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway

This real-life The X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the true story of a computer programmer who tracks paranormal events along a 3,000-mile stretch through the heart of America and is drawn deeper and deeper into a vast conspiracy.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball reveals a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the giant offices of major league teams and the dugouts. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free.

A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

The incredible true story of the card-counting mathematics professor who taught the world how to beat the dealer and, as the first of the great quantitative investors, ushered in a revolution on Wall Street.

Principles: Life and Work

Ray Dalio, one of the world's most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he's developed, refined, and used over the past 40 years to create unique results in both life and business - and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Movie Tie-in Edition)

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited at home and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king, here, in Jordan Belfort's own words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called the Wolf of Wall Street.

The 1997 Masters: My Story

In 1997 Tiger Woods was already among the most-watched and closely examined athletes in history. But it wasn't until the Masters Tournament that his career would definitively change forever. Woods, then only 21, won the Masters by a historic 12 shots, which remains the widest margin of victory in the tournament's history, making it an iconic moment for him and sports.

The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

In March 2006, the world's richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with Â­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, king of the credit-default swap.

Dangerous Odds - a true crime thriller memoir - is the explosive, never-been-told, behind-the-scenes look into the world of illegal sports betting, revealed by an insider. Marisa Lankester, a young beauty with a privileged New York upbringing, stumbles into the back door of the largest illegal sports betting organization in the US, run by Ron (The Cigar) Sacco. Marisa, a thrill-seeker, maneuvers herself into this mob-run men-only bookmaking operation and becomes a trusted insider.

Publisher's Summary

In the midst of the Go-Go '90s, the culture of greed infused the MIT campus. A small blackjack club sprang up, dedicated to counting cards and beating the house at major casinos around the country. The Club grew slowly at first, but by the late 1990s, the right people had come up with the right system to take some of the world's most sophisticated casinos for all they were worth. In less than two years, this ring of card savants earned more than $3 million from corporate Vegas. This is the true story of how they did it.

Bringing Down the House is everyman's dream, certainly every gambler's dream, and gambling is a growth industry on the East and West Coasts.

A cross between Liar's Poker, Ocean's Eleven, and The Cuckoo's Egg, this fast-paced caper features the most unlikely of heroes, a bunch of super-smart MIT geeks. Before the dot.coms kidnapped the mathematical geniuses of MIT, here's what higher education produced from the dark underbelly of the Ivy League, where kids with brains, money, and bright futures were just as likely to be found gambling in a Paradise Island casino as putting in time in the library.

The content of this book is very good and interesting. Unfotunately, the narrator does such a horrific job that it makes it almost unlistenable. I will NEVER buy a book if this guy is reading it again!

I have never wrote a review on here before. I am usually happy with all the narrators on the books I get here. This is horrible. I can't believe this guy is drinking and burping out loud on the book. I am considering just giving up and deleting the file.

Despite the bad reviews based on the "poor narration", I went ahead and got this book. There is nothing wrong with the narrator. There were no burps, gurgles, wheezing, or gulping to really notice. Not the best narration I ever heard, but certainly not worth some of the scathing reviews.

I like true crime stories, especially ones where the charater (or perpetrator) is a genuinly likeable guy getting over on the system (think Catch Me if you Can). This book rates right up there and was an exciting read. The movie with the same title does not compare, as it is completly re-written for Hollywood and changes just about everything. The book is MUCH better and details the life of the MIT students who used their brains to beat the system.

The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because the author switches back and forth from his point of view to the main character's, and proves a bit confusing at times. Other than that, an excellent book.

I will say of all the books that I have purchased from Audible, this is certainly the worst when it comes to sound. While I think the narrator does a good job, the other noises (being swallowing, etc), can be a little distracting. That being said I also think it depends on how you listen. If you are listening to your book with headphones you will notice it a lot more. I however listen in my car on the way to work and it was not that bad.

In the end, the book is worth the irritation of the sound. The narrator does have a good voice for the book, it's just to bad the sound engineer did not do his job. Still I highly recommend the book.

I had wanted to read "Bringing Down the House" before the movie "21" came out, but Audible didn't offer it as an audio book until then. So I saw the movie first. I liked the movie so much, that I immediately downloaded the audio book as soon as I could.

Just like many books made into movies, there are numerous differences between the two, but they are both very enjoyable. However, I preferred the book over the movie just because of how much more detail is provided regarding the card counting techniques and team play. Even though the book lacked the cheesy romance (as played out in the movie), it more than made up for it by being more realistic and believable.

A lot of other reviewers noted the narration was sub-par. While the narrator wasn't the best I've heard, he certainly wasn't the worst. (Although he did sound a little like Casey Kasem.) If you're listening to this in your car, you most likely won't notice the recording flaws. However, they will become apparent when listening to it with headphones.

If you're interested in seeing the movie and reading the book, go see the movie first. I think if I had read the book first, I would have been more disappointed in the movie.

I too have listened to quite a few books over the past few years and I can't think of any book more exciting than this. Despite the corporate image Las Vegas has nowadays, I suspect this description of how the city really functions is probably accurate. When the group is getting caught (you know they had to--otherwise where is the story?) I found myself becoming extremely nervous. This type of reaction doesn't happen too often in listening to non-fiction. Definitely a worthwhile listen, maybe for a long boring car ride.

This book held me captivated. There has been the big craze since this movie came out or maybe earlier, so I jumped on board. I listened to this book and then did internet research, granted many people don't consider that type research reliable, I did it because it was easier. From what I understand the author took some liberties which is understandable, I really enjoyed it. I am not going to go and start counting cards, but it made me talk to folks who are black jack fans alot more and see their take. Enjoy.

As you will quickly discover, the movie may have been inspired by this book, and borrowed its premise and a few of its characters, but beyond that the two have little in common. The book goes into much more detail about the scheme, contains a raft of more interesting characters, is much more ambiguous about the morality of everyone involved, and does a much better job of explaining how it all ends up going downhill. It's likely more "reconstructed" than actual reportage: the scenic detail and quoted conversations are clearly manufactured from bits and pieces of reality, reconstructed into neater, more vivid people, images and events. But the conceit that this is all true does short-circuit any idea that the book will have clear heroes and villains, or that it will reach of Hollywood conclusion. I liked that about the book, frankly. It's well performed and thoroughly engaging. Credible? Well, part of the fun is guessing what's fact and what's embellishment. Kind of like gambling itself.

Before I decided on the book, I was so scared of the narration from all the bad reviews, that I almost didn't get it. But after seeing the movie "21," and being an avid gambling fiend myself, I decided to take my chances. It was an intriguing story with hints of the movie, and I didn't hear any of the complaints about the narrator. In fact, I just heard an engaging story, which is what a halfway decent narrator is supposed to do. If you liked the movie, you'll love this book.